Tom Moorhouse's top animal writing tips

The best animal stories pluck you from your everyday life and immerse you in a world that’s a bit like ours but strangely, almost magically, different. Here Tom Moorhouse, author of animal adventure capers The Rising and The River Singers, offers his five top tips for writing furry fantasies…

Here’s an odd question for you: how is a wildlife documentary like a fantasy novel? Well, one answer is that I’ve been obsessed with both since I was a child. I used to watch David Attenborough almost as avidly as I devoured books like A Wizard of Earthsea. But beyond that, both will pluck you from your everyday life and immerse you in a world that’s a bit like ours but strangely, almost magically, different. What a good nature documentary does is show you how life looks to an ant, a flying squirrel, or a bower bird. It makes you realise there are other ways of seeing things. Fantasy books do the same, by putting their characters somewhere with different rules and dangers and watching how they react.

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